Paper short abstract:

Conjoining the anthropology of bureaucracy, digitalization and affects/emotions, this paper explores the multiple ways in which public servants currently respond to, and against, the massive expansion of digital tools profoundly transforming Germany's administration of migration.

Paper long abstract:

Conjoining the anthropology of bureaucracy, digitalization and affects/emotions, this paper explores how public servants respond to the profound transformation of Germany's administration of migration currently taking place through the massive expansion of digital tools meant to increase decision-making capacities. Charting the emergent terrain of numerous digital technologies and work-flow-management systems in German migration management based on ethnographic fieldwork, expert interviews and document analysis, the paper focusses specifically on the conflicting sentiments of bureaucracies that such technical innovations produce. Referring to entanglements of thinking and feeling in the formation of judgements and normative decision-making within bureaucratic processes, such sentiments range from enthusiasm for the promised work simplification and increase in efficiency, via skepticism, in principle, to any innovation, to outright rejection based on a perceived loss of control through the increasingly centralized and black-boxed digital infrastructuring of decision-making from afar and the networked distribution of work-flow information, through which bureaucrats themselves become increasingly legible beyond the immediate reach of their superiors. Thus, confronted with the emergent affective digital bureaucracies of German migration management, such conflicting sentiments provide diverse orientations for public servants who find subtle ways to deal with, and act against, these new procedures. At the heart of this paper, we thus trace how conflicting bureaucratic sentiments arising within, and against, the affective digital bureaucracies of Germany's new migration management shape patterns of administrative behavior that, in deciding about the legal status of migrants, massively affects these precarious "clients" of migration management in Germany.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the nuanced meanings accorded to law by Zimbabwean judges and politicians, to argue for understanding not only of how law can be mobilised for political ends, but of how specific interpretations of law influence the construction of state authority within postcolonial polities.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines political contestation within Zimbabwe's judicial system through a focus on land cases. I argue that these cases offer insight into how specific, politicised, interpretations of law influence the construction of state authority within postcolonial polities. To contextualise the understandings of law that emerged in contestations over land in the courts after 2000, I first situate law historically to examine what kind of judicial culture emerged from the interplay of law's repressive and reformative roles under Rhodesian rule. Under colonial rule, the tensions between judicial officers' commitment to formalism on the one hand, and their efforts to deliver 'substantive justice' on the other, shaped the legal cultures of professionalism that carried over into the postcolonial era. Responding to growing opposition in the late 1990s, ZANU-PF, Zimbabwe's ruling party emphasised a narrow retelling of liberation war history, and turned to land for political currency. I argue that when land reform was challenged through the courts, ZANU-PF drew on its specific understanding of history to frame its land policies as ensuring 'justice' for colonial land alienation, and as protecting the 'sovereignty' of the Zimbabwean nation. In this manner, challenges to the government's land policies were cast as 'unjust'. Certain legal and political actors, however, contested ZANU-PF's interpretation of 'justice' by drawing attention to the judiciary's historical commitment to 'substantive justice'. Through public debates between certain judges, law-makers, politicians, and street-level bureaucrats, on whose justice law ought to protect, the law has remained central to state authority in Zimbabwe.

Paper short abstract:

The paper investigates how the critique of bureaucracy voiced by young state employees in Niger shapes the everyday work in the asylum office and how both informal and direct criticism are nevertheless linked to forms of compliance with the unwritten rules of the administration.

Paper long abstract:

Many young state employees in Niger I encountered vividly criticized the bureaucracy for being inaccessible, corrupt, inefficient, hierarchic, unfair and controlled by the old generation, resembling the criticism of service user's, such as asylum-seekers and refugees.

I will trace how the negative identification with their workplace contributes to shaping the daily work in the administration, situating the staff in a dilemma of frustration and compliance. They have to comply, since paid labor is rare in the Sahel state. However, they voice frustration and contempt of the place that structures and secures their everyday life.

I encountered two forms of opposition, which were always tied to compliance. Some staff informally criticize in semi-private conversations as they have learned that their prior reform proposals were not welcomed. They passively wait for a societal change: "Just some old people will have to die and young ones take their positions" as one tried to convince me. Others criticize their superiors upfront, but have to rely on other forms of solidarity with them (political or social links, denouncing the ethnographer) in order to avoid falling from grace.

Nevertheless, these strategies combining criticism and compliance are based on the same mechanisms present in the administration that these staff criticize - clientelism, hierarchies and unfair behavior ("coups bas") . Therefore, it is questionable if the young generation's access to power will actually lead to the administrative change they vividly support.

The material is based on 13 months of ethnography in and around the Ministry of Interior's asylum office.

Paper short abstract:

This paper argues that due to an expansion of migration control, targeting not only migrants with precarious legal status, today migration policies are more and more characterised by an undermining of welfare state logics and suspicion towards any migrant individual.

Paper long abstract:

Austerity politics become increasingly mundane and widely used by many European countries. Due to an expansion of migration control, targeting not only asylum seekers and those residing irregularly on the national territory within Europe, today migration policies are more and more characterised by an undermining of welfare state logics and suspicion towards any migrant individual. This paper argues that there is a political advancement within migration policies, not only targeting irregularised migrant individuals, but increasingly controlling migrant populations with more regular status, in order to investigate, test and contest their 'belonging'. More specifically, this work will present ethnographically collected data from a Swiss case study, shining light on how street-level bureaucrats reflect the reception of social assistance by migrant individuals. Through their financial dependency on the welfare state, the latter risk losing their status, due to an alleged lack of integration. A critical analysis will bring forward how this assumed 'lack of integration' is navigated and constructed by street-level bureaucrats in charge of deciding the non-prolongation or withdrawal of residence permits in Switzerland. It will disclose how migration enforcement is already ridden with tension, expressed within the agencies, between them, but also between the bureaucrat and the 'client'.

Paper short abstract:

This paper demonstrates how an office within the City of Detroit enacts placemaking efforts in times of municipal marginalization, political uncertainty, and financial austerity through partnerships and projects that can be viewed as outside of the municipal frame.

Paper long abstract:

Recent scholarship on urban redevelopment highlights a myriad of ways on how cities are remade and reimagined under different political conditions. However, little attention has been given to municipal change and the workers who simultaneously facilitate and experience that change. For Detroit, USA, a city undergoing processes of urban redevelopment in the aftermath of the 2013 bankruptcy, migrant communities are seen as vital to the broader political goals of economic growth and repopulation. As such, the inauguration of Office of Immigrant Affairs in 2015 saw the importance of political, economic, and cultural capital such communities bring. However, the OIA remains underfunded and administration's support, particularly in the current federal climate and Trump's adverse immigration policies, resounds to silence.

Building on ethnographic data, my research demonstrates processes of municipal placemaking as a way of securing provision of services to residents and ensuring political viability within the municipal hierarchy. I argue that during these times: a) bureaucratic coalition building with community organizations and institutions becomes critical in ensuring that migrant needs are addressed; b) these coalitions serve as a stronger and fortified voice in setting the policies and agendas for current and subsequent municipal administrations; and c) moving along unconventional lines and beyond the municipal frames becomes paramount. As such, municipal workers find ways to ensure their place within the bureaucratic structure and also forge spaces for different, traditionally absent voices to participate and shape political processes and city policy.

Paper short abstract:

Taking the cases of large-scale anti-poverty initiatives in Brazil and Mexico, this project seeks to understand what happens to welfare policies after an abrupt change in politics, and how bureaucrats working to deliver such policies interpret and accommodate political change in their everyday work.

Paper long abstract:

Latin America is witnessing an increase both in poverty levels and political polarisation. In this context, the region's model of poverty reduction has—once again—become a contested space. Over the past decade, Latin America's two largest economies, Brazil and Mexico, have followed inverse political trajectories: Brazil from progressive to conservative, and Mexico the reverse. A drastic change in the respective governments' rhetoric regarding welfare and poverty is also evident. These shifts have resulted in policy changes that affect the conditional cash transfer programmes (CCTs), which are the most important anti-poverty interventions in the region. These are "Bolsa Família" in Brazil, and "Benito Juárez Scholarships for the Well-being" (former Prospera) in Mexico.

Regardless of the direction within the political spectrum, or the stage of policy transformation, frontline workers implementing social policies experience political change firsthand and are thus deeply affected by the rearrangement of political forces and institutional shuffling, especially when there is little political consensus over policies.

This paper will propose an approach to the study of street-level bureaucracies relevant to an ever more polarised world: ethnographically focus on how frontline workers interpret abrupt and profound political shifts and translate them into practice. To make the case for this research agenda, I will look back at my ethnographic research in Brazil's Northeast region, among social workers implementing the Bolsa Família programme, and discuss recent political developments in Brazil and Mexico.

Paper short abstract:

Policing bureaucracies get understood from the prism of impunity rather than through the form of labour entailed in practices of policing. This paper shifts the gaze inwards towards policing institutions to delineate how violence is accommodated within the processes of accountability.

Paper long abstract:

For Michael Lipsky, the patrolling police official is a street-level bureaucrat with the most disputable and dissonant goal expectation of duty that ranges between stringent law enforcement, the necessity for calculation in enforcement actions, and various community interpretations of proper police practice (2010:47). This paper argues that the question of police accountability, too, straddles between impunity that it increasingly seems to enjoy and of harsh intra-departmental enquiries about which we know very little. Without discounting studies of police impunity, this paper attempts to shift the gaze inwards towards policing institutions to delineate how violence is accommodated within the processes of accountability. This is not to bring equivalence between police violence and bureaucratic violence, but to contend that police personnel often live with continuing violence of a policing bureaucracy, which impinges on their practice. With the Delhi Police (Punishment and Appeals) Rules, 1980, as its backdrop, this paper discusses how show-cause notices, premised on quasi-judicial regulations, work on the presumption of guilt within policing bureaucracies. Through analyses of two cases of individual police officers taking their own superiors to court, this paper will demonstrate how amid routinised impropriety, humiliation and threat to employment—and not under work conditions of rule of law necessarily—that police work is performed. How might these conditions affect and inflect police work?

Paper short abstract:

Drawing on an ethnographic research, this project explores seemingly mundane practices and discourses across bureaucratic spaces to understand how bureaucrats cope with authoritarian interventions, disruptions and changes in the legal frameworks to forge spaces of autonomy and resistance.

Paper long abstract:

Bureaucracies are widely seen as lethargic and suffocating institutions plagued by red tape. Bureaucrats, in turn, are often assumed to have no space for individuality or autonomy in the face of overbearing bureaucratic ethos, hierarchy, and norms.

Given the recent reconfigurations of politics and society, much has been said about the decline of institutional autonomy of bureaucracy in Turkey. However, these analyses mostly focused on discourses-policies of Erdogan/AKP, widely neglecting how bureaucrats in these institutions negotiate, re-define, and re-work the law and state-society relations. Questioning the assumption that bureaucracies are simply lethargic and hollowed-out organisations and means of oppression/extraction, this research focuses on how bureaucrats cope with the recent entanglements and forge their subjectivity and agency within this socio-political setting.

Drawing an ethnographic research I conducted in two ministerial administration offices in Istanbul, Turkey, in 2018-2019, this project provides an analysis of the everyday and intimate workings of bureaucracy in contemporary Turkey. The research explores seemingly mundane practices and discourses across institutions to understand how bureaucrats cope with authoritarian interventions, legal disruptions, and the increasing interactions with the citizenry. It focuses on how bureaucrats weave networks of solidarity against authoritarian pressure and use their expertise to forge spaces of autonomy vis-à-vis nepotistic superiors as well as how the growing number of inputs from the citizenry (e.g., complaints) are instrumentalised to protect institutional autonomy. The research demonstrate how the law is "made real" (Latour 2002), how bureaucrats forge their subjectivities, and how the state operates in the everyday.

Paper short abstract:

With a focus on the cases of Sweden and Turkey, this paper addresses the position of "being a civil society person/feminist" within the state, which implies seeing a possibility for "changing from within", yet at the same time criticizing given policies that are supposed to make a change.

Paper long abstract:

The relationship between feminist movements and states has usually been considered as an ambiguous one, if not considered as a "betrayal" of feminist cause. Taking the risk of generalization, we can say that feminists are eventually required to step away from their engagement with the state, requiring legal reforms etc., and instead question heteronormative model of society. Obviously, in this framework, besides the fact that feminist groups who work closely with the state are not that much appreciated, feminism and bureaucratic practice are considered as mutually exclusive categories. In this sense, in its most simple way to put it, such a theoretical framework leaves no ground for accounting for gender equality mechanisms in bureaucratic practice other than leaving them suspect, and no ground for understanding the position of civil servants who deal with gender equality in general.

This paper seeks to address this latter question, with a focus on the cases of Sweden and Turkey, through the experiences of feminist civil servants: "being a civil society person / feminist" within the state, which implies seeing a possibility for "changing from within" (even though it is hard to realize), yet at the same time criticizing given policies that are supposed to make a change.